Sphinx 2.2.x series has been in the making for a while, rather extensively tested
in production, and the development focus has already shifted to 3.0 for a few months
now. So even though most betas are quite stable and safe for production use anyway,
a new official non-beta release is well due and we’re pretty excited about it.
Meet Sphinx 2.2.7-release!

Compared to 2.1.x series, it packs about an extra calendar year of
development work and around 70 new features (all scrupulously listed in the changelog).
The biggest highlights for those of you who are still on 2.1 rather than any of the
2.2 betas are as follows:

Full JSON support.

New and easy FACET syntax.

ALTER statement for dynamic index manipulation.

English and German morphology (lemmatization) support.

HAVING and N-best GROUP BY clauses for SELECT queries.

A new plugin system (CREATE/DROP PLUGIN, tokenization and ranking plugins, etc).

Support for N:M wordforms.

And for those who have been following our betas, the more noticeable new
niceties added in 2.2.7 since 2.2.3 are:

ALTER RTINDEX myindex RECONFIGURE statement that lets you apply new tokenization
and morphology settings to the new rows only.

SHOW INDEX myindex SETTINGS to easily examine those settings.

Support for N:M wordforms.

Much faster and cleaner tokenizing exceptions code (meaning that, if you use
tokenizing exceptions like C++ or M&M, blend_chars will now work, indexing will now be faster, etc).